I attended a wedding in Washington, D.C. last month. As a resident of the other Washington, the one which is an actual state, I like to call our nation's capitol “Little Washington.” I had visited Little Washington on a family trip several years ago to see the part where all the monuments and federal buildings are—half ultramodern office complex and half Our American Government: The Theme Park. This time around, I got to see the city as its residents see it.
Washington, D.C. is a city that was centrally planned and didn’t go according to plan. Perhaps there’s a metaphor lurking here. The original plan was appealing enough, a diamond-shaped city crisscrossed by diagonal avenues named after the thirteen colonies or after Important Abstractions like the Constitution. I suspect it was never intended to be a big city, and when it ended up such, they had to superimpose a New York-style grid over the original diagonal plan. But now the new grid appears to be the primary one; when you come across one of the original diagonal streets, it seems an irregularity. So what D.C. looks like today is Manhattan with a lot of Broadways. Which is very curious.
D.C. is a nice city, genuinely clean and pleasant. It’s probably the cleanest, pleasantest city I’ve seen anywhere outside California. But there’s something artificial about the niceness. Visiting San Francisco, you get the sense that the city and its people are pleasant because Californians value that sort of thing, whereas D.C. feels like it carefully cleans itself up in order to impress the guests. This is, after all, the showroom unit, the display copy, the American City™ that we show to countless foreign dignitaries who are probably very curious as to what an American City™ looks like. And so we spend a lot of time and effort making it presentable, not just cleaning it but also making sure it has very nice versions of all the features that a city is supposed to have: a very nice subway system, nice bus service, nice parks and trails. They're nice because they have to be. Only the nice townhouses in Georgetown strike me as organically nice: if you had townhouse in Georgetown, wouldn’t you spend the effort to keep it nice?
All the artificiality can make us forget that D.C. is a real city, with local shops and nightlife and cultural institutions that aren’t just the National Such-and-Such or the Smithsonian Institute of Whatever. After all, the Model American City had better have culture as well as infrastructure. But the locals report that the culture is dominated by politics; it’s not that politics actually pushes everything else out, but simply that politics gets all the publicity and prestige. Oh, well.
Over the course of my visit, several friends independently confided to me that they hate driving in D.C. because they “always get a ticket,” usually for some rule that they didn’t know about and still don't fully understand. It seems that nearly every intersection downtown has some inconspicuously-placed, ludicrously verbose sign governing its behavior. Many of them make no sense at all, or make the wrong sense. Consider:
SIX LANES
MON-FRI 6-9 AM, 5-8 PM
FOUR LANES
ALL OTHER TIMES
Huh? Does the street grow additional lanes? Well, sort of: if you look (during “all other times”), you’ll notice that there are four lanes of travel and two parking lanes, the latter of which presumably open up for travel during rush hours. Ah, but it’s not that simple. Yes, there are six lanes of travel during rush hour, but not three each way, or anything obvious like that. Instead, the two centermost lanes actually change direction at different times of day. There are no movable barriers or any such; there are simply multiple sets of solid yellow lane dividers, and you obey different lines at different times. All of my friends opted to drive only in the small number of lanes that never close or change direction. It seems safest that way.
But at least these kinds of rules are absurd enough that people take notice of them. (Also in this category are the various “traffic circles”: more than mere rotaries, these things have multiple layers, rotaries within rotaries, intersecting each other at entrances and exits.) Far more insidious are the random no-turn and turn-only lanes; the intersections that come together at such odd angles that it’s unclear which outgoing road is in fact “the same road” as your incoming road; and a myriad other traffic irregularities with rules that you will violate if you’re not paying very close attention. D.C. traffic regulations are sort of a toxic runoff from the legislative process, an industrial byproduct of the city’s primary industry.
Yet, though this is a stressful city in which to drive, and although I experienced several near-collisions at confusing junctions and self-intersecting rotaries, nobody honks. Didn’t hear even a single horn. That wouldn’t be nice. Normal and healthy after a near-death experience, perhaps, but certainly not nice. And you never know when the other driver might be the Ambassador of Luxembourg.
We drove across the Potomac to visit Arlington National Cemetary. Looking back at the city across the river, I was struck by its skyline: the isolated neoclassical architecture of the Capitol surrounded by a bustling city street grid and suburbs. I began to imagine how today’s D.C. would look to visitors from the eighteenth century. They’d know the city by its original plan, with diagonal crisscrossing streets meeting at the Capitol Mall. That city is still recognizable today, but it’s as if it has been swallowed up by a sprawling metropolis which, when you come down to it, is bracingly modern with its hard, rectangular contours. Symbols on signposts speak of arcane systems at work behind the scenes. Curious vehicles go back and forth on the river and along the shore. And then, every few minutes, a gigantic metal flying machine goes by overhead, to remind us that we are in the Age of Technology.
And in the end it's only to be expected that D.C. should look like a postcard vision of the Modern Capitol. It really is a showroom display, a working model of The American City. What it lacks in authenticity it makes up for in clarity. If it’s a little finnicky, a little obsessed with obscure, detailed rules… well, that’s us. For better or for worse, D.C. is a showcase for our values as we consciously envision them. New York is the dirty, highly functional unit; D.C. is the meticulously tuned, carefully rehearsed demonstration. I think each has its place.